If Darkness Takes Us Read online

“Um, kids. That’s more than a fire over there. There’s a yellow glow behind it, all the way across, as far as I can see.”

  Keno and Tasha crowded up next to me at the window, making anxious sounds in their throats. We ran to the front window and saw the same glow to the north beyond the trees. Tasha gasped out loud. I gasped inwardly.

  “What is that?” I asked, though my breath had left me. “It’s how I always imagined the northern lights would look, except it’s all around us.”

  “I’ll google it,” Keno said, then he slumped. “Uh, guess I can’t.”

  “Damn,” Tasha said.

  “It could be a glow from a geomagnetic storm,” Keno said, and his breathing sped up.

  I whirled around to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “Back in the 1800s, the sun took out all the telegraph lines once, back before electric lines.”

  “I think I heard of that.”

  “The sky all over the planet lit up with colors, like the strongest Northern Lights ever seen, except it was in Australia, too.” He ran his hands along his scalp beneath his hair, like he was fixing to squeeze his head.

  Tasha grabbed hold of my arm. “I’m scared.”

  I pulled the trembling girl close. “I know.”

  “Okay. . . . Okay,” Keno said, pacing in a circle. “Our sky isn’t as bright as that. That was a total geomagnetic storm. I don’t think it killed anyone. This doesn’t seem as strong as that. There aren’t bright colors all over the sky, right?”

  “Good. . . . Good,” I said, releasing a breath. I hugged Tasha hard. “Don’t worry.” I was trying to be comforting, though I needed comfort myself.

  I pulled a chair in front of the big front window and sat down to study the yellow glow that rose and fell as though it was breathing. The kids stood watching with me, all of us seeming to breathe in time with the undulations of the glowing pulses of light.

  I don’t know how long we watched. Could have been an hour. The lights were hypnotic, so much so that the kids started nodding off.

  “Kids, you should go to bed.”

  Tasha went to her bedroom and closed the door. Keno lay down near me on the futon in the game room.

  “I think we’ve been lucky,” he said. “A geomagnetic storm—if it’s strong enough—it can suck the atmosphere clear off the planet.”

  “What?” I jumped to my feet, then tried to quiet my voice. “Is that going to happen? Could it still happen?”

  He sighed a stuttering sigh, taking his time. His voice shook when he said, “Well, it could always happen any time, but it’s never happened yet.”

  “Right. In all of history, it never happened. How do you know all this, anyway?”

  He shrugged under his sheet. “I like space stuff.”

  “I hope you’re right, Keno. I really do.” I leaned over to kiss his forehead and smooth his covers. “Good night, sweetheart.”

  “Night.” He squeezed my hand with an electric strength.

  I went to my bedroom and used earphones to fiddle with the wind-up radio we had at this house. I didn’t find anything but static, so I gave up after a frustrating half-hour.

  I didn’t sleep much. How could I when the world had changed so drastically, when the sun had gone crazy, when more than half my family was far away, possibly injured or dead?

  Although I was operating on the assumption that Keno’s theories about our situation were correct, I hoped like hell he was wrong about the power and right that we didn’t need to fear the sun.

  If I had been a praying woman, I would have prayed, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

  Instead, I snuck downstairs for a shot of whiskey. I confess that I drank too much at night during that first and second week. And part of the third and fourth. I tried to hide my drinking from the kids. I’m sure I didn’t succeed.

  The morning after the disaster, the smoke had cleared. The glow in the sky was still there, but it had lessened some. I rousted the young ones early, sat them in a row before me, and told them they had to do their pooping in chamber pots, which grossed them out completely. Grossed me out, too.

  “Why can’t we go to the other house to poop?” Milo asked.

  “Because we can’t let neighbors see us coming and going from that house. We can’t let them know how much food we have.”

  “Why not?” “How come?” “But, Nana. . . .” they pleaded.

  “I know this is hard. But it’s extremely important that you do what I say. Don’t tell anyone about the other house or the food. Do you hear me?”

  Before I got answers, there was a knock on the front door, despite the early hour. I answered the door to find Silas Barnes, Gary Matheson, and several other men and teenage boys.

  “Morning, Bea,” Silas said, removing his ball cap.

  “Morning, Silas. What’s up?”

  He twisted the hat in his hands. “We’re, uh, we’re going scavenging for food and water. We wondered if your grandson can come.”

  “Keno? Where are you going to scavenge?”

  Silas blushed. “Stores, empty houses, you know...”

  “Empty houses? But that’s theft. We’ve only been without power for less than a day.”

  “But without cars and water and phones, too. This whole thing is bad. You saw that weird light in the sky. If we don’t get the food first, others will beat us to it.”

  “Silas, really? People may still come back to their empty houses. Are you that desperate already?”

  “We’re trying to avoid getting that desperate,” Gary said.

  “I can’t let Keno go.”

  “Why not?” Keno exclaimed from behind me. “I want to go.”

  “Keno, I’m responsible to keep you safe until your mother comes home. This kind of thing could get you shot.”

  “Excuse me,” Silas said, “but don’t y’all need food?”

  “Not yet,” I answered, then almost slammed the door to hide how appalled I was at what I’d said.

  Keno stood beside me, staring down into my face. “Please, Nana.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  He threw his hands in the air and spun away.

  “Can we borrow your wheelbarrow?” Silas asked, a charming grin on his unshaven face.

  Before I could say no, Keno said, “I’ll get it.”

  “Keno?”

  “What?” He glared at me as he stomped out to the garage.

  I no longer trusted the sun. I kept half an eye on the sky, night and day. I told myself that the sun would not go full rogue on us and send a pulse to suck our atmosphere away, but I had a hard time believing it. The one and only consolation I had—and it was twisted—was that, if it happened, we would die fast and our worries would be gone. I tried to bury my fear of the sun and concentrate on more practical concerns, like water.

  Austin sits on the dividing line between the dry Southwest and the sultry Southeast. Inside the metroplex, things are fairly lush, yet still much too dry as of late. But we had three half-full lakes, the Lower Colorado River, and a great urban tree canopy, though the drought had killed too many trees. Procuring clean water was going to be our biggest problem.

  We fired up the grill and cooked all the meat from the freezer, plus pepper-tomato kabobs and ears of corn. Most neighbors did the same; the meat was fixing to go bad.

  Several people—men, mostly—got in their cars and tried to start them. But the only noises that came from any of those cars were dry-clicking ignitions, slamming doors, and loud curses.

  When the meat was just getting going, who should appear outside my fence but the mailman, on foot with a big bag of mail in a kid’s wagon. I rushed to the side gate, which was next to the cluster mailbox for my block.

  “You’re actually delivering mail? What a trooper you are.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. We had a lot of mail at the station. Thought we might as well get it out. No telling when more will come in, but when it does, we’ll deliver it best we can. Makes me wish I had a horse.”<
br />
  “I think we’re all wishing that about now,” I said. “I sure do appreciate your work. Anything for me? Bea and Hank Crenshaw, 1211 Pico Street?”

  “Sure is.” He handed me a box from Express Scripts. My prescriptions. Hallelujah! Three more months of survival for me, though I’d finagled quite a stash for myself already.

  “Does anyone at the post office know what happened, how far this thing goes? Is it all over the state or only here or what?”

  “No one knows, but we expect we’ll be hearing from our bosses, soon as they figure out how to get in touch with us.”

  “Will you let me know if you hear anything?” I asked.

  “Sure will.”

  “Thank you, and thanks so much for keeping your appointed rounds.”

  The mailman stood up straighter and made a tipping motion against the brim of his hat.

  I never saw him again, or any other mail deliverer for that matter.

  A group of unfamiliar men came down my side street that afternoon. They carried ragged bags of groceries and looked half beat-up—one with a puffy lip, another with torn trousers and a limp, a third with a black eye. They stopped to talk to Mr. Jeffers, then moved on out of the neighborhood.

  Mr. Jeffers saw me watching, and when the men departed, he came to my fence.

  “Those guys were down at the H.E.B.” That grocery store was two miles southwest of us, and Mr. Jeffers had managed it for years, until he’d recently retired. “The store opened up to hand out their food, which is what I woulda done. But hundreds of people were there and not much food. Looked like the employees already cleaned the place out. I woulda prevented that shit. Anyhow, people being people, they had a big scuffle. Not a full-blown riot, but lots of shoving and punching, trying to get the last food off the shelves.”

  “Heaven help us,” I said.

  “You got that right.” He stepped back, his mustache tweaked up at one corner. “Bea, how you doin’? You got what you need for those kids?”

  “We’re okay, thanks for asking.” Though I felt guilty about it, I refrained from telling him how okay we actually were.

  As night fell, the glow on the horizons gradually reappeared, though perhaps less brightly. Silas and his gang of looters sneaked one or two at a time back into the neighborhood, pushing overflowing wheelbarrows. They gave us a box of Butterfingers in payment for use of our wheelbarrow. It looked like they’d mainly looted beer, sodas, and snacks from a convenience store. And cigarettes.

  After we and most neighbors had stuffed ourselves with meat all day, the kids and I chatted by the fading light of the barbecue. I sat with my back to the outer edge of the patio to avoid staring at the ethereal yellow glow, which was undulating as if it were alive. I wondered if it was some kind of fire that was too far away for us to see—a town, or an industrial complex maybe. Except that I could see the glow to the south as well, and I had seen it last night to the north. Besides, it had no smoke.

  I needed to distract us from our worries, so I got the kids talking about their goals in life.

  “I want to be a cop,” Milo said.

  “Really? How come?” I asked.

  “It’d be cool to catch bad guys. Being a jet pilot would be cool, too.”

  “Sounds exciting. Better study your science.”

  “Really? Then maybe I’ll just be a cop.”

  “You still have to study, Milo.”

  “Not as much, though,” he said with a cockeyed grin. “Or maybe I’ll be a general. I like to boss people around.”

  “You can’t boss me around,” Mazie said. “Mom told you not to. I’m gonna write stories when I grow up. I already wrote some.”

  “Stories. That’s a great thing to do, Mazie.”

  “I want to be an environmental scientist,” Keno said. “I wish I already was one. It would come in handy about now.”

  “No kidding. You kids make me proud. What about you, Tasha?”

  “I don’t know.” She stood up and shrugged. “I was gonna go to college and travel the world to figure it out.”

  “That’s a good plan.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “Honey, it still is.”

  She scrutinized me, wrinkling her brow. “Maybe I’ll invent a cell phone that works without electricity.”

  “Great idea,” I said. “Could you do that tomorrow?”

  As we laughed, I suddenly remembered the solar panels. They weren’t working right then because they were connected to the grid. But there was a way to disconnect them and have them generate power on their own. I’d made sure of that before I bought them.

  I mentioned this to Keno, and it got us all excited, especially him. He felt certain he could disconnect the panels from the grid and get us some electricity.

  “Will my iPhone work again?” Tasha asked.

  “There won’t be any internet or transmission of calls. Whether it will play music and games, I don’t know.”

  “Depends on the phone,” said Keno. “Pretty sure mine is burned up.”

  “Yes, let’s not get our hopes up about the phones. In the morning we’ll search the house for the solar manual. It’s too dark to find anything now, plus I’m too tired from all the cooking.”

  I was beyond exhausted. How could I keep doing this? I looked away, choked up with worry. When I had my voice under control, I said, “Time for bed, kiddos. We’re going to get up early and get ourselves some power.”

  “Hoo-rah!” Milo said like a Marine, and we laughed.

  It took me three drinks to fall asleep that night, partly due to worry, partly due to overexcitement. Daft old broad, why hadn’t I thought of the solar panels sooner?

  Plus, it was too quiet around here. That and the glow outside my windows unnerved me.

  I finally fell asleep when I pulled out the Geiger counter and listened to the random tick of the ever-present background radiation—the radiation that always surrounds us, that comes from the rocks and the sun, and that causes us to age and die naturally, if we could manage to leave it the hell alone.

  EIGHT

  FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Keno climbed like a long-legged spider over the Pico house exterior, checking connections on solar panels. Milo helped him occasionally from the ground, usually with Harry on his heels. The girls and I planted greens galore, winter squash, and purple hull peas in the raised bed in the side yard. We also harvested tomatoes and peppers from pots, and we planted more in seedling trays that could be brought inside when the weather turned, though it was mid-October and the weather showed no signs of cooling.

  I didn’t have much sunscreen, so I made the kids wear long-sleeved shirts and hats. They moaned and groaned about it, but I kept after them until they gave in. The Texas sun was bad enough in normal times, but for all I knew it could be deadly now.

  Harry kept getting in our way in the garden and whining, still coughing some, which worried me. I had Milo take him for walks, but I insisted he stay on sidewalks I could see from my backyard. Why was Harry still coughing? I kept kicking myself inside.

  Late morning on the second day, I heard racket inside my main house.

  “What the hell?” I hurried to open the back door to find a freckle-faced boy bolting out the front door with an armload of canned goods.

  “Catch him, Milo. Quick!”

  Milo zipped into the house and out the front door. Keno clambered down the ladder and rushed out the gate as screams and curses exploded from the front yard. With my heart jumping out of my chest, I tried to catch my breath as I hurried out the front door.

  “You’re a freaking thief!” Milo had the smaller boy face-down on the ground amidst scattered cans of food. Keno had just arrived to pull Milo off the kid—a damned good thing since I had no breath to even speak. I leaned against the garage door and doubled over, gasping.

  “What do I do with him?” Keno asked. He had the freckled boy by the collar, lifted up so that the kid’s toes barely touched ground. Mazie and Tasha ran toward us from the backy
ard.

  “Bring him here,” I said, and I sat down on the door stoop.

  Keno had the squirming, squealing boy in front of me in seconds.

  “Let me go!” the boy cried.

  “So, Mr. Freckles, what’s your name? Where do you live?”

  “I ain’t sayin’.” He wriggled extra hard, and Keno twisted the kid’s collar tighter.

  “Why would you steal food from me and my kids?”

  “I dunno,” he muttered.

  “I’m sure that you do know.” I tried to catch the boy’s darting eyes. “You have to tell me before we let you go.”

  The kid stopped squirming, and Keno relaxed his grip, but only a bit.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me,” I said.

  Mr. Freckles didn’t say a word.

  “Do you have food at your house?” I asked.

  He shrugged and started coughing.

  “What am I going to do with you? Do you promise not to steal from us or the neighbors again? Because, I swear, if you do, I will let these boys beat the crap out of you. I might whup you myself.”

  The boy gulped, wide-eyed.

  “Let him go, Keno.”

  “Wait! What?” Tasha said. “Why are you letting that little crook go?”

  “What do you want me to do? Lock him up?”

  “Paddle him or something.”

  “He’s not my kid. As much as I’d like to paddle him, I can’t.” A week ago, I wouldn’t have considered paddling a child at all, especially someone else’s. Part of me wanted to give food to this kid, but I didn’t want his family thinking they could come to me for food.

  “Tell his parents?” Keno asked.

  “Normally, that would be the way to handle it. But how do I know his parents didn’t send him over here?”

  My grandkids looked perplexed and angry. Keno let go of the boy, who glanced at each of us then took off running around the corner.

  “Milo,” I whispered, “follow that kid and see where he goes. Don’t leave the neighborhood though.”

  “Really?” Milo turned to rush away.

  “Don’t let him see you, and come home before dark.”

  “K,” he said, and slipped around the same corner where the kid had disappeared. Harry barked like crazy from the backyard as Milo ran past.